What's History?

thomasratliff

This guy in my Sunday school class, Thomas Ratliff, is running for Texas State School Board. He’s the moderate Republican opposing a right-wing conservative Christian Republican, Don McLeroy. McLeroy is a dentist who leads a majority voting bloc on the Texas State School Board, which is literally rewriting American history in textbooks from a Christian, more specifically, a self-discribed, “fundamentalist” right-wing conservative Christian, perspective.

My husband forwarded me this article he read in The New York Times, How Christian Were The Founding Fathers? It has 10 pages of really scary, “it might be time to consider home schooling the kids,” quotes in it from the controlling members of the Texas School Board.

Lucky for us, we’ll be in Colorado, I said.

Yeah, except for Texas basically writes the textbooks for the rest of the states. They order the most textbooks, and textbook companies don’t want to lose their business, so they write them according to what the Texas School Board votes should be put in them.

From The Times article, Tom Barber, who worked as the head of social studies at the three biggest textbook publishers before running his own editorial company, says, “Texas was and still is the most important and most influential state in the country.” And James Kracht, a professor at Texas A&M’s college of education and a longtime player in the state’s textbook process, told me flatly, “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.”

Damn it!

You’ll probably want to send Thomas Ratliff some money (and vote for him if you’re a Texas Republican) unless you’re cool with the actual rewriting of history to include one very, very specific religious light on history.

Which, as a Christian, I’m totally cool with, as long as that Christian worldview is my Feminist-Mormon-Housewife-Methodist-Liberal-Democrat-Christian-Spiritual-Conciousness-Yogi perspective, of course.

…..The Founding Fathers did too share my perspective! I’ve read all kinds of historical documents to prove it.
……Yes, they did.
……Shut up. Yes, they did too. No Anti-Christian Fascist agenda is going to convince me otherwise.

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